Thursday, May 27, 2004

Me Lie--Time for a Colinectomy

Why didn't President Gore call for Powell's resignation too? The latest Harry Potter book has less fiction and fantasy in it than Powell's UN presentation last year did. From the Baltimore Sun, via the Chicago Tribune:

Powell: Iraqis cited in UN speech not foundWASHINGTON -- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Wednesday that U.S. investigators have been unable to find or identify the Iraqi officers whose recorded voices plotting to deceive United Nations inspectors provided a highlight in his presentation to the UN last year about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

"We can't find those guys. I don't know who those guys were. But the tapes were real tapes. We didn't make them up," Powell said in an interview with reporters from six newspapers.

Powell's Feb. 5, 2003, presentation to the UN Security Council included voice recordings that bolstered American assertions that Hussein was hiding stockpiles of banned weapons.

The recordings were made from what Powell described as intercepted telephone conversations. The Iraqis were identified in Powell's speech as military officials. They were identified by rank but not by name.

In one of the tapes, a lieutenant colonel relays an instruction from the Republican Guard chief of staff for "scrap areas" to be inspected before UN inspectors arrive, adding, "After you have carried out what is contained in the message . . . destroy the message."

Chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix, whom U.S. officials portrayed as insufficiently aggressive in exposing Iraqi deception, later raised questions about the tapes in a book, writing that he didn't know where the U.S. had obtained the tapes.

But the tapes were real! Best evidence indicates Memorex or BASF; lab is investigating. Could it have been "Captain" Chalabi and "Colonel" Cheney? And shouldn't somebody have wondered about a captain ordering a colonel anyway?

Actually, I should give Powell the benefit of the doubt. Both Captain and Colonel were probably killed (one shocked, the other awed) in the invasion based on Powell's lies, along with probably tens of thousands of other Iraqi soldiers.